1. Field
Apparatuses, methods, and computer readable mediums consistent with exemplary embodiments relate to standardizing data from various devices, and more specifically, to integrating data from various devices using an application interface and providing the data for analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of simulation training is growing rapidly. A simulation training session is a session in which training of personnel is performed through the use of a simulator device that outputs real-time data in response to interactions of the trainees.
In the medical industry, for example, medical training centers conduct simulation training that generally involve students performing simulated medical procedures and/or examinations on a mannequin simulator, which exhibits symptoms of various ailments of a patient during simulated examination sessions. Other types of medical simulators include EKG machines, blood pressure monitors, and virtual reality endoscopic, laparoscopic, and endovascular simulators. During each simulated examination session, which usually takes place in an assigned examination room, the student interacts with the patient during an appointed time period to make a diagnosis of the patient's ailment and to prescribe a proposed treatment plan or perform a procedure. Each examination room is equipped with monitoring equipment, including audio, visual and time recording devices, so that the student's simulated encounter with the patient can be monitored in real time by an evaluator, such as a faculty member or upper class person. Typically, simulation training sessions are also recorded on video for subsequent analysis and teaching purposes. A similar configuration is used in other industries for other types of training sessions.
Also, actual procedures such as a surgery performed in a hospital or an assembly in a manufacturer plant may be recorded by monitoring equipment for further analysis and study.
The monitoring equipment in the examination/practice rooms may include multiple audio/video (A/V) sources, e.g. video cameras, to provide various camera angles of the training session. A typical recording session may have three video feeds, for instance, taken from different camera angles, and one of the video feeds might show a machine that displays data from a simulator, such as EKG, heart rate, or blood pressure data. Also, other monitoring equipment may be used e.g., the ones that receive output from the sensors.
To combine data from different sources (monitoring equipment) for centralized analysis such as quantifiable analysis and management, various analytical applications are developed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/611,792 filed Dec. 15, 2006 by Lucas Huang and Chafic Kazoun titled Synchronous Multi-Media Recording and Playback with End User Control of Time, Data, and Event Visualization for Playback Control Over a Network describes such an analytical application. The disclosure of this application, application Ser. No. 11/611,792 is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Accordingly, multiple different data sources and various analytical applications exist for managing the data from these data sources.
Currently within the healthcare IT environment and other environments, users must deal with the complexity of managing multiple analytical systems and data sources for medical events. As explained above, the data needs to be centrally managed but there is no single interchangeable format for all types of devices and no single programming application interface (API) for data exchange between these different analytical systems and data sources.
Healthcare IT companies typically have proprietary API's and sometimes make these selectively available. Furthermore, all the different device manufacturers implement a different mechanism of storing data and few implement a way to exchange data and interact with the devices. These devices sometimes need to be the master driver of a simulation start and end. As such, the devices need to communicate with the analysis application versus the analysis application communicating with the device.
An approach that has been attempted is for the industry to agree on a single standard data format. This has been in the works for years and has not gone anywhere. Different companies cannot agree to use a single format.
Conventionally, there is no way for a device to communicate to an external system in a consistent manner across devices and the data for the different devices is not normalized.